I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!
(save the images to zoom in on the pics)
Many scenes from The Runaway’s Promise take place in an abandoned minesite. I found this super helpful!
Friendly reminder that GIMP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and it’s 100% free. Fuck DRM and the license culture, we have plenty of open source options available to us as a consumer.
Lightworks is a freeware video editor on par with Premiere
Blender is an excellent freeware 3D renderer,possibly better than After Effects
Well, there are the basic questions about their personal history, most of which you’ve probably thought of. Things like:
Where were they born?
What was their childhood like?
What’s their family background?
How did they become an adventurer?
But when it comes to characterization and forming a basic personality, you may want to consider the following:
What are their hobbies?
What are their weaknesses/fears?
Who, if anyone, do they care about the most?
How do they typically deal with frustration?
What makes them happy?
What do they take pride in?
What is something they might want to change about themselves/their life?
If they had a bunch of money, what might they do with it (other than buy adventuring gear/equipment)?
If you can answer these questions, you’ll be able to start getting into the character’s headspace. You’ll also be laying the groundwork for some character development, which can be very exciting to roleplay!
Be sure to leave some blank space in your backstory as well. I can guarantee you’ll get flashes of inspiration as the game goes on.
Thanks for the question! I hope your game is lots of fun!
For this blog, I often use pixabay and unsplash and similar websites that offer all photos with free use. On those sites, attribution isn’t required (but it is appreciated by the photographers), and you can use the photos for whatever you want for free.
When doing informational posts with multiple photos, a lot of times I use the photo directly from a wikipedia page. Usually those are either free to use or just ask for attribution.
I also use flickr which has filters you can use to show only results that allow free use, usually with attribution. I choose “all creative commons” in this menu after a search on flickr:
All results after you choose that filter would be from photographers who allow their work to be shared. There are certain restrictions on some of the photos, sometimes that you cannot change the work in any way or that you can’t make money from using it. Flickr has icons under each photo that show which uses a photographer allows, like this:
If you click on the icons, it tells you what’s required to use the photo. In the above case, these are the terms:
So they make it pretty easy to find photos that you’re allowed to use without getting in trouble.
I’ve also found DeviantArt is pretty safe, since they allow creators to choose whether or not to put Share links on their work, like this:
Plus, then you can hit the share on tumblr button and it opens a window to create a post of the work with links to the photographer’s page already inserted. I have come across pages with Share links enabled but then under the photo it says that it may not be used or shared, so be on the lookout for that.
Hope that was helpful! I’m sure there are many other sites out there that offer photographers the choice to share their work or not, but those are the ones I use the most.
ifesbob 